19. Augustine (354-430) and Ambrose (340-397)

However, Augustine, in sharp contrast to Ambrose who had baptized him, was not aware of this sickness and cure and passed on his ignorance to his followers. The Carolingian Franks, their allies, the Vatican and most Protestants have been and continue to be his followers. Add to this all Orthodox victims of Peter the Great’s Westernization of Russian Orthodoxy.

Augustine himself tells us how he came to first believe that Christianity and Platonism were two sides of the same coin and how he later came to see some basic differences. He tells us in his Confessions how he yearned to discuss his problems of faith with Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, but ended up speaking about them only with Simplicianus, (VIII.ii) the presbyter who was to succeed Ambrose as bishop of Milan. As soon as Augustine mentioned that he was studying the Platonists, Simplicianus reacted by rejoicing “over me, that I had not fallen upon any other philosophers’ writings” Then Simplicianus recounted how, when he was a priest in Rome, he had received Victorinus into the Church. He was the very same translator of the Platonists whose writings Augustine was studying. Augustine left this meeting with Simplicianus with the impression that Platonism and the Bible are both two sides of the same coin. Had Augustine paid closer attention to Ambrose’s sermons he would seen how the bishop of Milan saw no identity in doctrine between Platonism and Christianity. In answer to Augustine’s query about what to study in preparation for his baptism, Ambrose wrote back that he should study the book of Isaiah.

Augustine tells us that he did not understand this Book of Isaiah. So he and his friends engaged in philosophical discussions in their preparation for baptism. Minutes of these discussions were kept and later published. One of the basic conclusions of these discussions was the following statement of Augustine: “Meanwhile, I am confident that I shall find among the Platonists what is not in opposition to our Sacred Scriptures.”(80)He later corrected himself in his Confessions by pointing out those Biblical teachings which he claims to have found in the Platonists and those which he did not find there.[81 ] This became the Franco-Latin distinction between natural revelation to the pagan philosophers and supernatural revelation in the Bible. According to Augustine the doctrine of the Holy Trinity belongs to natural revelation and the incarnation and related matters to supernatural revelation, a position rejected by all Fathers including Ambrose.

For the Fathers of the Nine Roman Ecumenical Councils there is no such distinction between natural and supernatural revelation since there is no similarity between the created and the uncreated. There is only the cure of the sickness of religion by means of the stages of the purification and illumination of the heart which leads to glorification during which one sees that there is no similarity whatsoever between the created and the uncreated.

Augustine did not have the slightest suspicion of the existence of these fundamental presuppositions for understanding the Old and New Testaments from the viewpoint of those who had reached glorification and which ordains prophets. Therefore, he never understood “that there is no similarity whatsoever between the created and the uncreated and that, therefore, it is impossible to express God and even more impossible to conceive God.” On the contrary he writes “I will not be slow to search out the substance of God, whether through His Scripture or through the creature. For both of these are set forth for our contemplation to this end, that He may Himself be loved, who inspired the one, and created the other.” The technical term for this division between supernatural and natural revelation is analogia fide and analogia entis which are both rejected by the Fathers of the Church as the fundamental basis of heresy.

The Carolingian Franks started their theological tradition in the latter part of the 9th century knowing only Augustine. These Franks had not yet become acquainted with at least a second Father of the Church when Charlemagne went ahead with condemning the Roman Empire as “pagan” and “heretical” in his Libri Carolini. This is the first time in history that a whole nation was condemned as pagan and heretical and indeed by illiterate barbarians who knew only the text of the Bible and Augustine. Up until this time individual leaders and their followers were considered pagan or heretical, but not a whole nation. What is most amazing is that at this time the first Frankish theologian in history, Rabanus Maurus, was an 18 year old student of the Saxon Alcuin, the director of Charlemagne’s Palatine school, who himself knew only Augustine. Then Charlemagne’s Council of Frankfurt (794) re-confirmed the heretical and pagan nature of the Roman Empire. It was at Frankfurt that Charlemagne started the tradition of calling the Roman Empire by the name “Greek Empire.” However, he kept the name “Roman Empire” for the “Papal States.” In this way all enslaved West Romans, including the Irish after 1066,[ 82 ] would now be praying only for the “Papal Roman Empire” and no longer for the now supposedly heretical and pagan “Greek Empire.”

20. The Rise of the “Byzantine” History Lie and Balkanization

Being a “commoner,” and therefore not privy to the reasons for the Franco-Latin nobility’s falsification of Roman history, Edward Gibbons (1737-1794) used the name “Roman Empire” in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” right up to its fall in 1453. He read history out of the Roman sources and not as a scheming member of a conspiracy. This is what he found in all the sources of Roman history. The keepers of the Carolingian tradition reacted by transforming the Roman Empire into a “Byzantine Empire” which supposedly appeared in about 717AD. This date comes quite close to Charlemagne’s date whereby he transformed the Roman Empire of his Libri Carolini into the Greek Empire of his Council of Frankfurt in 794. However, the real reason for the transformation of Charlemagne’s Greek Empire into a Byzantine Empire was avoid the ridiculous reality of what was becoming reality in, for example, the London Protocol No.59 of January 30, 1836. There “Greeks” who fought in their revolution to break away from Turkey and establish their own state, but were left outside of its borders, are depicted as becoming “Hellenes” by virtue of the right they are being given to leave Turkey and immigrate to Hellas. In other words they are being liberated not only from the Ottoman Empire, but also from Charlemagne’s “Greek” Empire which had survived as a Church within the Ottoman Empire. This is reality from the linguistic Franco-Latin and Russian viewpoints. However, from the viewpoint of the linguistic tradition of these “Greeks” and of the Turks these “Greeks” are called Romans in Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Coptic, Syrian, Armenian, Ethiopian, etc. In other words Charlemagne’s “Greek” was at this time limited to the confines of the Franco-Latins. This Protocol was signed upon the occasion of the settlement of the final maps which had been drawn up showing the boundaries between Hellas and the Ottoman Empire and to permit those “Greek” or Roman revolutionaries, who ended up in Turkey, now that the maps between the two countries had settled, to go to the new State of Hellas as being now already “Hellenes.”

We translate from the original “Lingua Franca.”: “Always understood that, those who will be considered Hellenes from now on, and will take their place in the category of those who will profit with the right of emigration are: – 1st All the native Greeks of the Ottoman territory, who had emigrated before June 16, 1830, and who did not return to Turkey to re-settle there: 2nd. The Greeks to whom the right of emigration had been accorded by the Protocol of June 16, 1830, and who emigrated between the date of said Protocol and December 9, 1835, the day that the Map of the frontier had been delivered to the Port; on condition that they have fulfilled the conditions in regard to this present Act.” Here we have a distinction between Greek Hellenes and Greeks who are not Greek Hellenes which we find in a Declaration of the Three Courts (Britain, France and Russia) “0n the occasion of the election of Prince Othon to throne of Greece” dated august 30, 1832 which opens with the salutation “Hellenes!” and goes on to call these Hellenes “Greek” also. So here we have a distinction between Greek Hellenes of Greece and those simply Greeks within the Ottoman Empire.

But the British, French and Russians had also set the trap for the eventual disappearance of the Roman name. After we deal with how they almost finished the job, we will turn our attention to the reason why. One may have a clue by asking oneself whether one is a member of the Franco-Latin royalty or nobility or not. If the answer in no, then one is a Roman or a descendent of Romans or of ancestors who migrated to, or were taken by force, to former Roman Provinces.

During the French Revolution the Gallo-Roman serfs and villains made up 85% of the population and were being guarded from escape by 40,000 castles. The mostly former Gallo-Romans and now the Middle Class made up the 13% of the population. This means that the Gallo-Romans made up 98% of the population of France in 1789. In other words the nobility comprised only 2% of the population. Napoleon destroyed the power of the Gallo-Romans and saved France and Noble Europe and Russia from a general takeover of Europe by the sub-strata of society which at the time was not educated enough to make profit on their overwhelming numbers.

But the greater danger facing the royalties and nobilities of Europe lay in Edward Gibbons’ revelation that the so-called “Greek Empire” is really the Roman Empire. This history was translated into French in time to have an impact on the French Revolution. This intensified the awareness of the Roman unity between East and West Romans which had been distorted by Charlemagne’s “Greek Empire” which was hidden from the enslaved West Romans. Because of Gibbon the Gallo-Romans produced their revolutionary song called the CHANSON DE BELISAIRE (The Song of Belisarius) the great Roman general who was sent by Emperor Justinian to liberate the West Romans from their Teutonic conquerors. Napoleon finally suppressed the overwhelming power of the Gallo-Roman element and restored the power of the Frankish nobility. He himself belonged to that part of the Franco-Tuscan nobility which had remained faithful to the Carolingians and for this reason supported the French Revolution against the descendants of King Hugh Capet (987-996) who had terminated the Carolingian line in France. By means of Napoleon’s victory over the Gallo-Romans and his suppression of their revolution, he personally transformed the Robespierrian plans to support an East Roman Revolution against the Ottomans into an Ancient Greek Revolution against both the Romans and the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I agreed on this plan in 1806. Their successors continued the effort and were joined by Great Britain.

The foundation of the plan for the destruction and the dividing up of the Ottoman Empire between Britain, France and Russia became the Balkanization of Ottoman Rumeli and the Westernization of both the Orthodox Christians and the Moslems. But this process required the use of a new term in order to cover up the falsification in progress. What had to be solved was a problem inherited from the Franco-Latin tradition which came into existence in 794. Since this year the Franco-Latins had been calling the East Romans by the name “Greeks.” But these so-called “Greeks” were still calling themselves Romans while the Turks, Arabs and other non Franco-Latin peoples were calling them Romans also. So to claim that Hellenes are being liberated from Romans made sense in these languages, but not within the Franco-Latin tradition. To say in the Franco-Latin tradition that “Hellenes” are being liberated from “Greeks” is a nonsensical contradiction in terms. The name “Greek” is the Latin word for Greek and “Hellene” is the Greek word for Greek. So the term “Byzantine” was finally chosen by Britain, Russia and France to make it possible to depict the Hellenic Greeks as being liberated from the Byzantines. This position was first made public in George Finlay’s “History of Greece” But before Finlay’s “History” appeared, we come across decisions whereby Greeks are being legally transformed into Hellenes. Thus, in the London Protocol of 1/30/1836 signed by Britain, France and Russia, we come across “Greeks” being legally transformed into “Hellenes” in the French language. In Turkish we have “Romans” being legally transformed into “Hellenes.” Because Greek diplomats at the time knew French they therefore felt that they did not require translations. But in translations subsequently made we find “Hellenes” being transformed into “Hellenes” instead of “Greeks” being transformed into “Hellenes.” In other words they did not know that the Franco-Latin use of the name “Greek” had become a substitute for the name “Roman” since 794.

In order to hammer more nails into the coffin he was building for the eventual demise of the Roman Empire, Charlemagne added the Filioque to the Roman Creed of the Second Ecumenical Council of 381 and condemned all who disagreed with him as heretics at his Council of Aachen in 809. Charlemagne accomplished all the above when his specialists knew only Augustine. Franco-Latins who could read and write were a rarity.

When these Franks realized that they could not quote only Augustine when debating with free Romans, as had happened in Bari in 1088, they began their peculiar tradition of collecting isolated sections of the Fathers which they found in collections of canons (Church laws) and scholia on the Bible and enslaved them all to Augustinian categories. They continued to do the same with complete books of the Fathers as they became available. In this way the whole Franco-Latin tradition got bogged down into trying to understand texts of the Bible, Fathers and Councils out of context in an Augustinian mindset. This tradition was followed by all the allies of the Franks.

Even in this age of so-called dialogue the nobility of the Vatican and that of the Protestants, in their new cooperation via the World Council of Churches, is still searching for those Orthodox who use their own Augustinian categories to negotiate with.[ 83 ] What comprises the core of the last part of this paper was adopted by the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches meeting in Moscow as part of the material to be studied at its General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Canberra. In other words the Central Committee which is the legislative body of the Council was circumvented by those who really run the WCC’s show.

What is left is to translate the biblical “spirit of man” and the patristic “noetic energy” into the categories of neurobiological sickness due to the short-circuit between the heart and the brain and its cure. And indeed the whole of Vaticanian, Protestant and Peter the Great Orthodox theology is indeed nothing else than the result of this short-circuit between the heart and the brain.

What one must realize is that terms which belong to metaphysical categories were and are used only by heretics in support of their positions. The Fathers were forced to use these terms and categories against the heretics themselves, but never with the intention of using these terms and categories as parts of definitions of God. This Augustine never understood.

In sharp contrast to the Augustinian metaphysical tradition all decisions of the Nine Ecumenical Councils of the Roman Empire are founded on the following three axioms:

1) There is no similarity whatsoever between the uncreated and the created.

2) It is impossible to express God and even more impossible to conceive God.

3) What is common in the Holy Trinity is common to all Three Persons and what is individual belongs to only One Person.

One can understand how and why Augustine is not aware of these axioms. He simply did not pay attention to Ambrose’s sermons. I am not aware of any Western history of Christian doctrine which is aware of the existence of these three axioms in the theology of the Fathers of the Ecumenical Councils.

The second key to this study is the historical context within which the sickness and cure in question was sidestepped by the Teutonic conquerors of the West Romans who fell in love with Augustine’s doctrine of predestination which coincided with their tradition of settling questions of truth by trial by fire. According to Augustine everyone has inherited the guilt of Adam and Eve and is worthy of eternal damnation. But God has predestined that number of humans to replace the fallen angels regardless of their inherited guilt and worthiness for eternal damnation. Therefore, the salvation of those predestined does not depend on their personal worthiness, but solely on God’s choice. Because many French revolutionaries of 1789 assumed that Augustine’s version of the teachings of St. Paul and the Bible were correct they blamed their many centuries of enslavement under the Franco-Latin royalty and nobility on Christianity itself.[ 84 ]

The most important of the Teutons were the Goths, Franks, Burgundians, Lombards, Normans and West Saxons. Most of the East Saxons of England were enslaved by the Normans and remained part of European Roman society and found it normal to join the Varangian army of New Rome. The Franco-Latins conquered the whole of West Roman society and reduced it the status of serfs and villains. By about the 11th-12th century some Roman serfs and villains began the process of becoming the middle class of the Franco-Latin feudal system. They began to appear in walled towns defending themselves from their former owners, i.e. the castellani (the dwellers in fortresses with their families) who guarded the slave camps from which these Romans had been escaping.

The castellani in question had become virtually independent of their emperor and kings during the 10th and 11th centuries. This was because of the power they had acquired as the ones who had become mainly responsible for enslaving the revolutionary Romans in turmoil during the period that the Franks were fighting to take over the Roman Papacy. Otto II (973-983) forcefully placed the first non Roman, the Lombard Peter of Pavia, on the papal throne as John XIX (983-984) and provoked a revolution of the Romans in Rome aided by the Roman Emperor in Constantinople New Rome. Then Otto III (983-1002) placed Bruno of Carinthia on the papal throne as Gregory V (996-999) and Gerbert de Aurillac to succeed him as Silvester II (991-1003). These efforts having failed the German Emperors devised an interim plan of putting Tusculan Roman Popes on the papal throne between 1012-1046 in exchange of adding the Filioque to the Creed of Papal Romania. Then the Franco-Latins dropped this facade with their outright takeover of the Papacy in 1046.

The Franco-Latins had been forced to take over the Papacy because the Roman Popes had been using the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals, which appeared about 850 AD, to take control of all Franco-Latin bishops in order to either bring the Franco-Latin leadership under the rule of law and order and Roman Orthodoxy or even under Roman rule.[85 ]

Having lost any real control over the castellani the Rex Francorum (King of the Franks) in West Francia retaliated by taking the rebel Roman towns in question under his protection. He placed his military within the citadels of these Roman towns and franchised their citizens. At the time the name Frank meant not only a member of the Frankish race but also a free person. This gave rise to the distinction between middle class Franks, who descended from serfs and villains, and “noble” Franks, who descended from the race of the conquerors. The taxes paid by these middle class Franchised Romans made the Rex Francorum (Roy des Francois), the richest and most powerful monarch of Western Europe.

The Gallo-Roman serfs and villains called the middle class Romans “Francimander,” apers of the Franks, especially because they spoke the Frankish language. They called the Franks “Franciman,” evidently because the Franks at the time of the conquest called themselves so in their own Germanic language. This name Franciman survived in Gallo-Roman patois right up the revolution of 1789 and in popular poetry and songs.

We remind ourselves once more that when the French Revolution broke out in 1789 the population of France had just been counted for the convocation of the Estates General. The total was about 26 million broken down into 2% nobility, 13% middle class and 85% serfs and villains. The position of historians[ 86 ] that the Romans and Franks had become one people even in the time of the Merovingian Franks needs a bit more proof than is usually provided. In any case it is highly unlikely that more than 20 million Gallo-Roman serfs and villains in 1789 had descended from ancestors who had volunteered to become the serfs and villains of the ancestors of the Castellani (Chatelaine) of 1789 who were still living in 40,000 castles and guarding more than 20 million serfs and villains from escape. William the Conqueror’s “Book of Winchester” (Doomsday Book) seems to also corroborate the plight of the conquered medieval West Romans. At the time of the conquest even the Irish were praying for the Imperium Romanum not realizing that Charlemagne had restricted the name to the Papal States and had begun the Franco-Latin tradition of calling the Empire of New Rome, the Irish were praying for, the heretical “Imperium Graecorum.”

FOOTNOTES

[ 80 ] Contra Academicos, III, 43.n.

[ 81 ] VII, IX.

[ 82 ] George Every S.S.M., The Byzantine Patriarchate, London 1947, p.114.

[ 83 ] Both the Vatican and the World Council of Churches are using every means to make this old Franco-Latin tradition work in the 20th century and will indeed continue, unless the behind the scene Protestant nobility decides otherwise.

[ 86 ] E.g. Sir Samuel Dill, “Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age,” London 1926. For a popular version of this same position supported by the editors of Time-Life Books see Gerald Simons, “Barbarian Europe,” 1968. It seems that this position is strongly supported by some European nobilities while others claim that they are “nobles of the sword” because of their decent directly from the Teutonic conquerors of Western Europe.